The Economist has an interesting article about reforming academia in Europe to make it more transparent and competitive. Resistance is to be expected. Money quote:
Unleashing universities' "full potential", and "mobilising the brainpower of Europe" are at the heart of the commission's plans to create a knowledge-based European economy. And change is indeed coming -- but by accident. The trigger is a modest but worthy scheme called the Bologna process, which is designed to make it easier to compare courses between countries, and to move between them. So a Belgian student who spends a year in, say, France, gets a credit that means something at his home university. A university selecting candidates for an over-subscribed course will know how to rank a French student brandishing an "Assez Bien", an Englishman with a "2:2" degree and a Spaniard with a "Sobresaliente".* That doesn't sound very ideological. But the debates it has sparked certainly are. Europeans do not think the same way about higher education. As soon as you make the differences more visible, the rowing starts.
In Sweden, for example, academics are squabbling over calls to match their marking schemes with standardised Euro-grades, from A (excellent) to F for Fail. Students risk psychological harm, they fret, if visibly labelled successes and failures. Much better to stick with a two-level system of pass and fail, or (if you will insist on such elitism) one extra level of "pass with distinction" for the top quartile. Jacob Christensen, a political scientist at a Swedish university, Umea, suggested recently that Swedes "are expected to descend into deep psychological disorder as soon as they encounter disappointments in everyday life".In England, ministers and university bosses complain that the Bologna rules draw too deeply on continental ideas of student achievement, measured in terms of hours spent in seminars and lecture theatres. Forget hours of work, English dons insist: the world holds both quick learners and plodders. What matters is what a student has learned. They would say that, other Europeans retort; they decry Britain's one-year taught masters' degrees as lightweight. The truth is that they are highly competitive (and attract lucrative students from overseas). Britain fears they may be threatened by the Bologna guidelines.
The Bologna process has no legal force behind it; but it is still forcing big changes. A voluntary agreement among governments, it extends far beyond the European Union with 45 signatory nations, from Norway to Azerbaijan. Self-interest explains much of its impact. Bologna has prompted a mass tidying-up of the tangle of different degrees awarded in different European countries. The main effect will be to ditch the continental style of first degree, which typically takes five or six years: expensive (for the taxpayer) and wastefully languid (for the student). Given that most governments in "old Europe" are terrified of introducing fees, shorter degrees offer the next best way of saving money.
Read the whole thing.
I know a little about the British system, but not very much at all about the rest of Europe. Do people expect these changes to be successful? Let me know if you have experience with these systems...
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Hey Jake, I'm a regular reader from Macau - keep posting!
I've got some experience of this - I graduated from University College London in the UK. We had exchange students from Europe, and I was surprised to hear that my 3 year Bachelor degree course was equivalent to a 4 or 5 year degree in Germany! In Macau, which was a Portuguese colony, if you study at a university, even at the undergraduate level, you are allowed to use the prefix Dr.! There are a few lawyers here who did law in Portugal and are walking around with Dr. before their name. At a Psychological private practise where I work, we have a European psychologist who has a degree whose title is a remnant of Soviet Times! So yes, it IS indeed a huge problem - each of us has to try and figure out what the other one knows through a battery of questions. Its all very frustrating. The Bologna debate was there at UCL, though from what I could understand, we didn't need to make many changes.
Either way, its a definite good thing - shame there isn't any REAL political will behind it...
In Germany, for example, some states make universities' funding conditional on introducing the Bachelor-Master degree system (except for the engineers, they get to keep their trademark "Diplom"). I used to think this change a bad idea, because a German first degree requires more knowledge than, e.g., a British BA. Since starting my Master/PhD in London I've had to revise this opinion. We actually took longer to learn essentially the same things.
At the economics and business department at my old university, they changed degrees two years ago. Now you have four years to complete a program (I needed five to finish two full degrees) that requires students to take less courses than before, but also leaves much less choice to the student and essentially is a prolongation of high school, only that you specialize in one field now. I guess it is too soon to tell how successful these changes really are, since the first degrees won't be awarded until 2009.
Another element of the Bologna process was, if I understood the article correctly, the introduction of the ECTS (European Credit Transfer System) to facilitate student exchanges between countries. This change can be qualified as a success, I think. It not only ensures that the courses you took abroad are adequately recognized, but also gives guidance in the decision of how many or which courses to take. This makes it easier to actually incorporate your six months or one year abroad in your main studies and you don't "lose" time in finishing your degree.